Style.uz Tashkent Fashion Week: Where East meets West

Foreign participants at the fashion shows included European “discovery of the year” Sisi Wasabi(Germany); such leading brands as Wolford (Аustria), DSQUARED2 (Italy), Revillon and Guy Laroche (France); headline-catching young designers like Alena Akhmadullina and Julia Dalakyan (Russia), Norio Surikabe with his brand Support Surface (Japan), Sunnet Varma (India), and members of the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology (China).

The initiator and organizer of Design & Fashion Week is Gulnara Karimova. Some know her as the Uzbek President’s daughter, but for most she is a prominent figure both in Uzbekistan and abroad, overseeing a wide-scale public projects and supporting many NGOs. Harvard-educated but also as a patron of the arts and an all-round creative personality.

Gulnara Karimova is a doctor of political science and also holds a degree from the New York Fashion Institute of Technology. Observers have described her not only as a diplomat who is known within the country as well as beyond its borders, but also as a patron of the arts and an all-round creative personality.

Chairing the Board of Trustees of the Uzbekistan’s leading public organization – the Fund Forum – and promoting Uzbek culture internationally, she pays special attention to the development of fashion and design. Along with being a fashion connoisseur, she also designs clothing and jewelry collections under her own brand Guli, which was also presented during the Style.uz.

The beginning and conclusion of the Style.Uz – 2008 were both marked by grandiose musical programs. World maestro Julio Iglesias performed on the first day of the Fashion week at the Tashkent Opera House. The closing ceremony held at the magnificent Registan Square of ancient Samarkand, a historical–cultural center of Central Asia, featured a concert by a rock star Rod Stewart.

During the week, a presentation by Swiss jewelers Chopard ended with a surprise as Chopard Co-President Caroline Gruosi-Scheufele and Gulnara Karimova announced the launch of a Chopard&Guli project to create a joint collection with profits going to charity projects of the Fund Forum.

Style.uz Design and Fashion Week was not restricted only to a dйfilй by international brands, but also represented a broad landscape of modern fashion and culture in Uzbekistan, reviving astonishing colors and structures of hand-made fabrics. It certainly served as a venue where East meets West, providing a platform for contemporary cultural trends of different countries of the world to come together. Art critics who participated in the event have already crowned the Design and Fashion Week Style.uz with the title of “Art Week”, for presenting incredible scale, beauty, and oriental color.

Source: www.time.com